Legends of Electronic Music: Tod Dockstader

Tod Dockstader works in the studio in the early 1960s. Photo: Courtesy Tom Steenland/Starkland

Wired’s new series Legends of Electronic Music explores the history of electronic music through in-depth interviews with some of the field’s pioneers. The series kicks off with a rare interview with trailblazing American electronic composer Tod Dockstader.

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ARLINGTON, Massachusetts — In the 1940s, before magnetic tape was widely available in the United States, electronic music pioneer Tod Dockstader made low-fi recordings on steel wire.

“I loved the idea of the wire singing,” Dockstader said in a recent interview with Wired. As a high school student in the ’40s, he used the end of a lit cigarette to make splices in the thin wire, in a painstaking and risky process.

“You had to tie the wire, which was very fine, in a perfect square knot,” he explained. He would hold the wire up to his nose, with the cigarette perched in his mouth. A single wrong move and the edit could be destroyed.

“I became very adept at editing,” he said. “I really liked editing; I understood it. To me, it was really basic stuff. You could make decisions — take things out, put things in. I liked that you were building something.”

Born in 1932, Dockstader was part of the first wave of electronic musicians, who, before the advent of synthesizers in the early 1960s, worked with whatever hardware they could find: reel-to-reel tape machines, sine wave generators and a wild array of homemade circuits and military surplus gear. In the process, they created a universe of electronic music that still sounds unique and prescient today.

The wire recorder Dockstader used to create electronic music was a piece of used military equipment. “A lot of this [electronic music] happened because, after the war, a lot of the stuff was available,” Dockstader said. “Normally a person, a civilian … wouldn’t be able to get that tube, this device or that device. That fascinated me.”

In the late 1950s, Dockstader worked as a sound engineer at Gotham Recording Studios in New York. At night, he worked on his own music, which eventually led to a series of impressive albums of electronic music, including Apocalypse (1961), Quatermass (1963) and Omniphony (1966).

“I was always working at night — deep night,” Dockstader said. “And I’d be very careful. If they found me in a studio — just me — I would have lost my job.”

In addition to working as a sound engineer, Dockstader created sound effects for Tom and Jerry cartoons, and also for Mr. Magoo and Oscar-winning 1950 short Gerald McBoing-Boing. Music from Dockstader’s first album, Eight Electronic Pieces, was used in the classic 1969 Federico Fellini film Satyricon.

Like fellow U.S. electronic explorers Raymond Scott and Louis and Bebe Barron, Dockstader was a maverick, working outside the usual confines of academia and institutional studios. In the 1950s, electronic music was still a rare endeavor, and the analog machinery required to make it was expensive and cumbersome. University centers, such as the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York, and government-sponsored powerhouses like GRM in Paris, tended to be the places where electronic music happened.

Electronic music studios in the 1950s were light-years away from the slick laptops of today. Vacuum tubes, which many of the electronics back then were based upon, could get very hot. “You had to be very careful, because they’d explode if you cranked it up too high,” Dockstader said. “Flying glass. Thin glass, but still. ‘Ka-boom!'”

But it wasn’t the machines themselves that fascinated Dockstader — it was the strange sounds that the machines could produce. “I wasn’t too interested in the technology,” Dockstader said. “I had the suspicion that in this kind of thing, tape, and its companions, there could be good sounds — musical sounds.”

Tod Dockstader's album Apocalypse was released in 1961.

Dockstader also used many “found sounds” from his environment, capturing them onto tape and manipulating them in various ways — a technique that the French called musique-concrète. “I didn’t have the money for electronic sounds,” Dockstader said. “I had to have things like bottles, or anything that would make a noise. It didn’t matter what it was; if it sounded interesting, or I could make it interesting, I’d go for it.”

A pinnacle of this technique was the album Water Music, released in 1963. For the album, Dockstader collaged dripping sounds caught from sewers, kitchen sinks, toilets and other unlikely places into a fascinatingly rich, complex work of music. The album still sounds new and relevant today. In addition to water, Dockstader listed “toy gong-rattles, Indian finger bells, sheet of metal, two test generators (rewired for instability), two water glasses, a Coke bottle, a metal garbage can (to hold the water), [and] a nail” as his sound sources, according to the liner notes.

Radio was another early source of fascination for Dockstader, and for many other electronic music composers. He experimented with radios throughout his childhood; he made ham radios using empty Quaker Oats canisters. He recalled the time he tried to open up the back of his parents’ device to “really get into the innards of the monster.” The radio had a shortwave band, which Dockstader used to pick up otherworldly sounds. (His three-part masterwork Aerial, released over the past decade, was based on earlier shortwave recordings.)

Science fiction was another early inspiration — sci-fi films were exploring new frontiers of human endeavor, and their soundtracks often included groundbreaking works from the nascent field of electronic music. “The ideas: ‘What could we do? Could this be done?'” Dockstader said. He compared his clandestine studio work to the adventures of Buck Rogers, the pulp superhero whose chronicles, beginning in the late 1920s, predated modern sci-fi.

Dockstader’s work over the past six decades continues to be met with new waves of interest. (A documentary about Dockstader’s life, by filmmaker Justin H. Brierley, is currently in the works.)

“I had no idea that electronic music — as it’s called now — would become anything of any value,” Dockstader said. “But because of some people, like [Edgard] Varèse — they were legitimate people. Important people. And they were doing this. So if they were doing it, then it must be important. Most people didn’t give a damn, one way or another.”

Dockstader said he viewed all of his electronic works over the years as if they were children. “I liked them, and I had the feeling, weirdly enough, that they liked me,” he said. “To me, they were alive. This wasn’t cold electricity. There was life in there — in this little box, or whatever it is. These glowing tubes at night.